A collection of sloppy snippets for scientific computing and data visualization in Python.

Thursday, April 9, 2015

Stacked area plots with matplotlib

In a stacked area plot, the values on the y axis are accumulated at each x position and the area between the resulting values is then filled. These plots are helpful when it comes to compare quantities through time. For example, considering the the monthly totals of the number of new cases of measles, mumps, and chicken pox for New York City during the years 1931-1971 (data that we already considered here). We can compare the number of cases of each disease month by month. First, we need to load and organize the data properly: